Memos stir up politics, confusion in Lee School Board

The interview pauses and Lee County Superintendent James Browder has a question of his own.

“Aren’t you tired of all of this?” he asks.

Strictly speaking, talk to that point had been about a recently completed state audit of the school district. But discussion of financial examinations brings out a certain something in school officials these days: irritation, passion and a tendency to bring up the political motivations of other parties involved.

In the past week alone, three people tied to the School Board have authored a flurry of pointed memos on district spending, special reports, high-level meetings and secret investigations.

They all have one thing in common: School Board member Bob Chilmonik.

Frustrated by the district’s slow response to his allegations of lax financial oversight and construction practices, Chilmonik is urging School Board Attorney Keith Martin to act where his colleagues will not. In a memo late last week, he asked Martin to talk with the state about audit findings that construction might have started on a Cape Coral elementary school before bonding was secured.

Martin refused, saying he needed the authority of the entire board to do that. He sent a memo back to Chilmonik in which he questioned his past actions, calling a meeting the board member had with members of the Lee Building Industry Association last spring an “ongoing legal concern.”

Martin said Wednesday he would have never aired his perspectives on Chilmonik’s activities had the board member not accused him, in yet another memo, of conducting a “secret investigation” into the BIA meeting.

Add into the mix School Board Chairman Steven Teuber, who in a colorful memo issued Wednesday compared a report Chilmonik’s issued last week about the district’s finances with a best-selling controversial work of fiction.

It all has Browder wishing everyone would just get back to the issue of what is going on in the schools. That’s what’s important, he said. Everything else is just politics.

On that point, all parties are in agreement.

“I take it as a personal attack on me,” Chilmonik said in response to Martin’s Wednesday memo. “The question is why? Is it politically motivated?”

Hours later, Teuber said he suspected the upcoming election was playing no small part in Chilmonik’s intense interest in the district’s finances. He said Chilmonik was silent when the board was presented past audits but now is leaning heavily on those same audits to make accusations of poor financial oversight by the board.

“He was presented that report two years ago. We all reviewed it,” Teuber said about a past audit that played heavily into Chilmonik’s examination. “Mr. Chilmonik didn’t say one word about that report. Two years later during the election cycle, all of a sudden it becomes a relevant document. Why did he have to wait two years to do it? If it would have had anything to do with the actual audit, it would have happened two years ago.”

And just like that, audits are being pulled from the dusty drawers to which they have been accustomed and are taking the spotlight, a suddenly sexy and incongruous point of contention.

Several are circulating at the moment. One is the May completion of a semi-annual review conducted by Florida’s Auditor General. The other is Chilmonik’s report, which drew heavily on that audit and several others to bolster his arguments. Yet another is an October report the school district commissioned from Cherry, Bekaert & Holland that pointed out the risks of building new schools quickly and without the proper controls.

Browder said the district is taking the state’s most recent examination seriously. He responded last week to each of the 11 recommendations it made, outlining revisions and improvements to the way the district does business, from the make-up of its School Advisory Committees to change orders it issues on construction projects.

Chilmonik’s report has not enjoyed the same quick response.

Teuber, who prior to the release of Chilmonik’s review said the document was nearly as eagerly anticipated as Dan Brown’s popular best-seller “The DaVinci Code,” continued that theme in a memo Wednesday.

“These assertions, if true, require immediate attention by the Board,” he said of Chilmonik’s findings. “However, like Mr. Brown’s assertions in his novel, there are factions in the public that may believe there exists ulterior motives for Mr. Chilmonik’s assertions, while others may believe that Mr. Chilmonik’s report, like Mr. Brown’s novel, is no more than pure fiction.”

Suggesting some see Brown as a “somewhat higher class of snake-oil salesman, a shill discredited for ideas that cannot be supported at the most basic level of inquiry,” Teuber went on to say that the board should do whatever it can to “clear up any questions as to the data, analysis and conclusions presented in (Chilmonik’s) report to avoid the same types of negative beliefs cited above.”

Teuber said he will move at the board’s next meeting to turn the report over to its new internal auditor.

Chilmonik sees that as progress.

“I think it’s a step in the right direction that we’re facing issue head on,” he said. “We need a full accounting of what’s going on.”

That’s in the best interest of two groups, he said, the students and the taxpayers.